The Ghost of Waterloo (42 page)

Mr Barnett Levey finally won his theatre licence and Munito (or one of his progeny) was still starring into the 1840s. Captain Rossi’s question of identity was resolved in his favour and Mr Samuel Terry died in 1838, richer than ever. He left an estate of 500000 pounds.

Mr William Balcombe died in March, 1829, of dysentery. Jane and Betsy battled on, and his other sons (I slimmed his male offspring to Thomas) settled and succeeded. Several of their properties, all named The Briars after their childhood island home, survive here. Thomas, however, continued to be troubled, and in 1861 shot himself dead at his Paddington, Sydney, home – called Napoleon Cottage.

Sir Hudson Lowe deserves more than a few good words said about him. I painted him as a villain because that was how the world saw him at the time. In truth, he was a fair man wherever duty took him. Far-sighted, he ended slavery on St Helena sixteen years before the rest of the Empire. It was the Bonaparte camp – and Boney’s many admirers in England (and there
were
many, just as there were of 1930s Fascism there) – that spread the propaganda about Lowe being petty and cruel. Lowe simply tried to hold to the ground rules established by the British Government. Sadly, the mud stuck then, and still does.

In this area, the Comte de Las Cases’
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène
(it actually made two volumes, but I saved the Patterer’s back), though a huge commercial success (if not a critical one: it was criticised as hagiography and being based on false documents), was most influential in propagating the growing Bonaparte myth: that he was really a gentle giant with only the good of the world at heart; and the whopper that he had actually won Waterloo but had been denied victory by some malign interference.

The French eagle in St Phillip’s church was repatriated to the Chelsea Barracks in London, but disappeared from there again, this time forever, in 1852.

Macquarie’s Fort made way for a tram depot in 1901 and is now the site of the Sydney Opera House, where the gunners’ ghosts regularly enjoy the
1812 Overture
.

The aria that the castrato Cesare Bello attempted to sing was, indeed, Napoleon’s favourite, truly written by Girolamo Crescentini. The hardbitten French soldier wept when he first heard it and, in 1805, made the musician the royal singing teacher. Crescentini lost his job when Napoleon first lost his, in 1814. The work disappeared from concert halls. In the mid-1950s, noted Australian conductor Richard Bonynge, then a student, found a copy in a Paris flea market. He finally recorded it – in 2007. Castrati are long gone – it was sung instead by a soprano, Deborah Riedel.

Macarthur’s ‘inquisition’ of the Patterer was inspired by an incident in Ben Abro’s 1963 thriller
July 14 Assassination.
His quiz questions came from
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Of the 40000 Spanish dollars cannibalised in 1813 only about 1000 dumps and 300 holey dollars are known to survive today, much prized by numismatists who pay hundreds of thousands of modern dollars for prime specimens. In 2008 even a poor dump sold for 36000 dollars.

Oh, yes.
What
about Valentine Rourke?

Before the police net could close and aware that his name was not recorded in the census, he waltzed aboard a ship bound for Liverpool, just a spit away from his native Ireland.

I think it was really
he
who dug up Dingle’s floor and kept, at least, the negotiable takings – the coinage, even the eminently meltable holey dollars and dumps. This may have added up to more than 800 pounds: twenty years’ pay for the weaver and shoemaker he had once been.

Val Rourke’s Irish eyes may have been smiling, but he wasn’t joking that day in 1829 … when he took the good ship
Midas
, on April Fools’ Day.

Measures and Money

Imperial measures have been retained in this story, since use of the metric system would have been out of character. Some approximate equivalents are: